Read My Mind
by BandGeek58407
Summary: SPOILERS for "Simple Explanation." Late that night, after everyone hangs up the garb of mourning, House is still reeling, trying to manage the unmanageable with the turning of pages at 4 in the morning. H/W friendship. Oneshot.


**I doubt that I'm the only one who was shocked by this episode. (sighs) So, as was stated in the summary, there are spoilers. **

**Disclaimer: I don't own it, though I wish I did just so I could change things. **

_**Read My Mind**_

The clock reads four o'clock in the morning—an early hour, an impossible hour, an ungodly hour. And at this hour, Princeton-Plainsboro is half living and half dying, the sluggish staff of the night shift sloshing through the dimly-lit hallways with missions of miracle-working still kicking against the fatigue and caffeine. At this hour, a good number of the remaining staff lay at home, staring at the ceiling, wondering, perhaps tossing and turning to undo the knot in their chests. At this hour, Gregory House is holed up in his office with the lone speck of light in that stretch of the corridor.

Why? echoes across the city and twisted into the questions, silent or articulated. It eats up their dreams and spits them back out as nightmares. It makes some of them worry for the first time since forever about Vicodin and a certain person they know. But it is never answered, for the night is silent, silent save for the casual flipping of pages in the shadowy office.

For once, House craved a distraction—not a whiteboard, not a patient, not even his friendly little pills. He needed something real to hold onto when even his cane threatened to pop loose under the five-ton pall haunting the hospital. So he finds himself gripping a near-human, but not quite one—but it's good enough for this. Not completely effective, but it works. At the end of every page, in the time it takes to transition anew, he sees his face and the why? keeps on burrowing into his pores.

"_The hat seemed to be asking rather a—" _WHY? _"lot…"_

The one hundred and nineteenth time, one hundred and nineteen times that has happened and he doesn't really feel like contending the next: significance increases in tens. One hundred and twenty would be asking too much. Today alone asked too much.

"I should've known you would be here eventually."

House sticks a finger in his place and closes the battered novel to look up at the newcomer, only not so new. Who knows how long Wilson was standing there before saying a word. Sighing, the diagnostician mentally curses the noiseless glass doors and the muffling carpet and moccasins on the other man's feet and the "thank God" sense of relief in his eyes. If he saw him coming, he could have demanded the solitude he sought, but now, now he has to indulge the concerned inquiries, though it doesn't mean he has to answer.

"I never pegged you for a _Harry Potter _fan," Wilson says as he takes a seat beside him on the couch.

"I…" Shaking his head, House rethinks the approach; just making a simple noise expends so much energy that he has to conserve it for something that matters. "Do you remember…that time we weren't exactly on…good terms?" He glances over to his friend in hopes he'll nod and understand despite the vague nature of the whole thing but those hopes were shot too high and crash into confused frowns. "Before you went to go see your brother…"

Finally he nods and House nearly smiles before it shrivels halfway to his tongue. "Yeah."

"Kutner referenced that"—he holds up the book lazily—"and I had not one damn idea what he was talking about."

"You're reading it so you can understand."

"I somewhat get the allusion."

"But not him." It's not a question and doesn't need to be.

"No." The novel flies to the table with a fluttering clatter and Wilson jumps at the sudden noise. "'Persona'…that word was tossed around quite a bit then, too. Was his foolproof or thin as paper?" That sound in his voice, he doesn't want that, that sarcastic bitterness, but it comes anyway. "Either way, we're fools or blind…or blind fools, foolishly blind…or what have you."

The day is chasing him and he wants to escape as much as he'd like to stay and just sit there with Wilson, enjoying the only company capable of driving away that pall. But the company is the one dragging it around like a fully-laden wagon. Without another word, he sighs and rises, beginning his slower-than-usual hobble to the silent door; at the last moment, fingers on the handle, he stops and turns and wishes he had an eraser for reality because he never wants to see Wilson look at him with that much helpless pain again.

"For putting up with me," he starts, "you get assigned to the house with the most un-masculine name." And at that, he leaves, but somehow from Wilson's angle on the sofa he can see him standing at the elevator, staring at the lights above, and, even when the elevator arrives, keep on standing until it drops back down to the lobby.

He doesn't lift his gaze from the scene down the hall but reaches to the book before him, leafing to the page where the spine is bent back at unnatural angles; it takes little time to work out which house he meant.

"_You might belong in Hufflepuff,  
Where they are just and loyal.  
__Those patient Hufflepuffs are true  
__And unafraid of toil."_

Before Wilson even registers that he's moving, his feet halt just to the right of House's and, in unison, turn toward each other, and though it feels wrong, the oncologist allows the tiniest grin to surface, the smallest upturn of his lips that conveys more sorrow than happiness.

"I just don't understand." Suddenly House blinks furiously—under the fluorescent lights, there's a definite sheen of moisture present until he can bear to look at Wilson without the flurry of eyelids.

And then—a clatter and a cane thrown to the ground, a stiff hand on Wilson's left shoulder as balance is searched for in a strained leg and mind…

"Don't let me do what he did," he murmurs, barely audible but to Wilson it might as well have been a scream.

"I never planned to."

X

"_You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us?" (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban)_

XXX

**Besides Wilson and House, Kutner was kind of really one of my favorites ever…and he will be sorely missed. (sighs once more)**

**Reviews would make me smile…**


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